Strongly linked to innovation, creativity is one of the great values or ideals of our contemporary age. Around creativity lifestyles, beliefs, stories and symbols coalesce. Be it thought of as embedded in a special class or diffused through social networks and circles, creativity could therefore be conceived of as the bulk of a new culture, the creativity culture.

Art festivals are among the major social and economic institutions of this culture, especially important and consequential as they connect different creative centres or actors at the same time as they select and present their products to various publics. Clearly, art festivals presume and produce issues of cultural and social representation as well as of inclusion.

Which publics are addressed by festivals? Which publics are excluded? And how do festivals choose among different creative actors and cultural producers? In other terms, how do art festivals precisely work as agents of this creative culture in the public sphere? Which functions do they fulfil? Which constraints do they pose? What impact do they have on the working and structuring of the public sphere? How may they work to promote inclusion? How do they impact on the organization of spaces, peoples, and on cultural diversity? And above all, how do festivals affect democracy as a discourse, a practice, and an institutional system? How can we explain their outcomes, successes or failures? These are the main questions the workshop will address, interfacing with the results of the EURO-FESTIVAL research consortium, to be presented and discussed in a dedicated session.

Speakers include scholars in the fields of creativity, democracy and the arts, from the disciplines of sociology, cultural and literary studies, anthropology and economics. But it is one of the main aims of the workshop to bring together academics with festival practitioners, professionals and policy makers, fostering their dialogue and confrontation.